Ticket Crystals

ATP;
2006

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Philadelphia's Bardo Pond have created distinctive space rock for 13 years, and while vocalist/flutist/violinist Isobel Sollenberger has frequently brought out her flute for contributions on previous albums such as On the Ellipse and Dilate, it always seemed to work better when used sparingly. Yet on Bardo Pond's sixth full length, Ticket Crystals, the flute makes an almost overwhelming appearance. And while it is a successful continuation of Bardo Pond's extensive catalogue of material, this album seems to flutter between beautiful, dense soundscapes and almost cloying prog mayhem.

One of Ticket Crystals' highlights is a take on John Lennon's "Cry Baby Cry", originally on the Beatles' "White Album", which brings Sollenberger's cool, elegiac vocals to the foreground with sweeping richness. While the main body of the song is a standard rendition composed of repetitive chords from electric and acoustic guitars, it suddenly breaks halfway through to reveal a mass of howling distortion and fuzzy vocal mumbling before filtering into waves of crackling harmonium.

Bardo Pond have always been at their best when they allow themselves to collapse into their non-linear, highly improvised drone rock rather than put too much focus on compositional structure. In most cases, their songs tend to gather organically at an intriguing, natural pace-- helped by the shared intuition that comes from playing together for more than a decade. "FC 11" is a perfect example of Bardo Pond's all-encompassing space rock psychedelia, and helps to ruffle up the more restrained and tiresome moments of Ticket Crystals. Beginning with what sounds like a ship sending out desperate warning signals, the track eventually develops into a heady-- virtually fluteless!-- expanse of heavily layered violin and finicky drumbeats that titter and splutter with impulsive, rollicking energy.

Ticket Crystals lacks the brutal guitar roar of the band's Lapsed, or the weirdly hypnotic embrace of its Amanita, but doesn't stray far enough to exclude the elements that made those records so great. The opening track, "Destroying Angel", is a promising start if you like Bardo Pond when they plunge into Kinski style freakouts and play guitar like Sleep on a (even heavier) cocktail of drugs. But moments like the tedious, flute-laden "Isle" let the side down. Nearer the end of the album, on tracks such as "Moonshine", Bardo Pond return to their dream-like drone and reverb-drenched vocals that envelop and echo as though Sollenberger is whispering serenades from across the widest of canyons.